


Monopoly on the TARDIS

by HariSlate



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka
Genre: Canon Non-Binary Character, Domestic Fluff, Gen, Humor, Monopoly (Board Game), non-binary doctor, references to other eras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-12 03:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4464620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HariSlate/pseuds/HariSlate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alison wants to play Monopoly, the Doctor agrees and the Master doesn't have much choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monopoly on the TARDIS

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mischieffoal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mischieffoal/gifts).



> [Inspired by http://theenigmaofriversong.tumblr.com/post/124703799561/imagine-the-doctor-playing-monopoly-imagine-the]  
> Not totally happy with how this turned out, but it's something.

It had been Miss Cheney’s idea to get the board. Of course. She had seen the bickering and decided that it could only be improved by sitting round a small table with some green cardboard and two little dice and a top hat.

The Doctor had looked the game up in the TARDIS databanks. Apparently, a previous companion had been rather fond of the game, and the Doctor was sure they had a copy somewhere...

They had had a copy, but it had been in the games cupboard, next to the laboratory. And another previous human had left some chemicals about. And one instance in which the Doctor had been playing around with the inner layout of the TARDIS had led to an... unfortunate occurrence in which the board game had met with an extremely potent nitroglycerin mixture. When that was combined with some of the other things that had been left out in the laboratory, it had unfortunately led to small metal pellets shooting at you whenever you opened the door.

The Doctor need not know how much of this was to do with the Master, but they insisted on keeping him locked up and he had to do something. It was only to be expected.

But the Doctor had instructed the Master to materialise the TARDIS on Regent Street in the mid-21st Century, which they said was the best time and place to get board games. They explained extensively to Miss Cheney that this was the point in the structure of the economy of London that a shop like this toy shop had reached the largest it could possibly be before it collapsed.

This was not strictly true, but the Master chose to let the Doctor go along with their theatrics. So long as they didn’t start singing.

As the Master pulled the final lever to stop the materialisation, he held the door lever.

“Doors.” the Doctor said, and looked round at the Master’s hand.

“Please don’t get distracted.” He pulled down the lever and the doors creaked open. The Doctor stepped out, and Alison followed. As she walked past the console, she felt a hand on her arm.

“My dear Miss Cheney, I mean it. They won’t listen to me, but perhaps to you. Please don’t let Them get distracted.”

* * *

The Doctor was waiting just outside the TARDIS. Alison hurried out, pulling on a Jacket against the heavy rain. She hadn’t been to Regent Street for a while -about fifty five years, local time- and it had changed somewhat.

There were designer clothes shops where the mannequins in the windows all looked like her. Exactly like her.

“Holographic technology. Scans you as you walk past the window. Good defence against Autons, but other species use holograms, you know?”

Alison only got a second to glance up at the sign above the door. There were no words, only a glowing symbol. It looked vaguely like a stylised bee, and as she looked a sound like the word sting, that was not the word sting, echoed through her mind.

She hurried on after the Doctor, who was looking up at the sign above the door.

“Hamleys? You wanted to come to Hamleys?”

“The biggest toyshop in the galaxy, at this time at least. And they have a good selection of board games.” They walked towards the escalator, as the Doctor looked at the floor map, and decided that Floor Six would be their best bet.

Alison did not remember it being that big.

“I took Harry here once... got banned. It was the scarf. Some of the children thought it was a skipping rope. That was how we got the original board...” They trailed off, and looked worried for a second. “I hope they don’t remember my face.”

Alison had no idea what they was talking about, so decided to ignore them.

“Sarah didn’t like it much. But she could still sometimes be persuaded.” Alison wondered how they could persuade the Master.

The entire sixth floor was taken up with board games, and they split up in their attempt to find the monopoly section.

The Game of Life section was huge, and had about fifty different editions, including a few that created virtual realities around you as you played, but they all seemed to consist of ‘Get a Job, Get Married, Have Kids’. Alison used to think that that would be her life. She had done, until very recently. She had tried to get a degree, but failed. She had tried to get a good job, but had picked one of the worst in the pack. But then the little plastic car broke down, and she had been stuck.

She moved past, into a giant version of Mousetrap, where she had to dodge massive plastic net, and into what seemed to be a Monopoly section, but none of them were actual Monopoly. They all seemed to have different names, and different rules. Slightly further on, she found the Doctor. They were looking thoroughly out of place in their long black cape, staring down a young child holding a box that was almost too big for them to carry. There was a dinosaur on the box, which looked to Alison that it was climbing off the box, but she told herself not to be silly.

“Ah, Alison, good. Please tell that child not to stare at me.”

“He zapped my toy!” said the child, who waved the box.

“It was giving off a massive reading of psychic energy.”

“Come on!” She pulled them past the child, and into what she was pretty sure was the Monopoly section. Now she just had to choose from the many different editions. Some of them were even stranger than what could be seen in the Game of Life section.

There were various different boards for individual cities, not just the London one and US one, there seemed to be one for every major city in the UK, and it was organised by countries. It seemed you could get to know almost every capital city in the world by its Monopoly board.

The Doctor however looked disapprovingly on those, and Alison walked a bit further till she found the Retro Section

The exact time that ‘retro’ intimated did not seem to be clear, and these boards resembled anything from some of the originals to designs that Alison felt must be after her time. But they were recognisable, at least.

There were still a lot of them though, and they stood there scanning the various boxes, until the Doctor stepped forward and picked up one that came in a wooden box with a little metal catch.

“I recognise this!” They said.

* * *

After they had paid, they were walking back to the TARDIS, and Alison was trying to avoid eye contact with any of the shop signs.

“Somehow, back when we were at the Academy, somebody managed to get a Monopoly set. Now, Monopoly’s not like chess, it’s not really played off of Earth. I don’t know why, but nobody seemed to get that idea anywhere else. Or maybe they did, and it never caught on, or they just didn’t think it was a particularly good idea. But, the point is, non-humans do not tend to play Monopoly.”

The Doctor unlocked the TARDIS.

“But we got a board, and we tried to play it. The Master was very good, but always insisted that it was silly. After a couple of games, I think Ushas, one of our friends... well, I think she got sick of it. I don’t know what she did with it, but it probably went through something quite similar to the old board in the TARDIS.” He patted the console, and looked around at the empty room. “Where is he? Oh never mind... Well, yes, the version that we had on Gallifrey looked very similar to this one here.”

Alison took the bag and pulled out the wooden box. It was heavy. The Doctor was tapping on a keyboard on the console.

“The games room is currently quite a way off from the console room, but that’s where it seems he is.”

* * *

“Ah, my dear Doctor, Miss Cheney, I see you’ve arrived at last.” The Master was sitting in an armchair reading what looked like Frankenstein. Alison always wondered if he needed to be comfortable. He certainly gave the illusion of it, sitting in front of a roaring fire in a big chair. He had his legs stretched out to a foot stall, and rubbed his hands in front of the fire as though to warm them. The copy of Frankenstein lay spine-up on his lap.

“That’s a signed first edition! I may ask you to treat it with more care.” The Master scoffed, carefully slipped a bookmark in to mark his place, and set the book down on a table.

He stood up, and took the box from the Doctor’s hands. He seemed to falter as he looked at it, but didn’t say anything as he placed it on the table.

“Gallifrey rules, I assume?”

* * *

Alison had played many games of Monopoly in her time, but none quite like this. The Gallifrey variation did not shake her too much. There were only a couple of changes. The main one seemed to be that all money goes into free parking. Alison did not bother to point out that there was a pretty obvious flaw to that way of playing, and just waited to see how it turned out.

For some reason, it had never quite struck her just how ambitious the Master could be. There was something about the Doctor that you got the feeling they would be eager to win, but the Master? Maybe it was the way he was so cooped up. The Doctor had given her a vague idea of the man’s life before their current arrangement, and world domination did certainly seem to be his style.

In Alison’s time, she had figured out some common ways to play it. Some people were tactical, some people just tried to get everything, some people managed both, and the Master was one of these. The Doctor’s way of playing was so erratic that she struggled to put a name to it. They had a glass of wine next to a stack of assorted notes, and had managed to store up three Get Out of Jail Free cards, which Alison attempted to ignore, since she was pretty sure that there were only two in the game, and at least one of them had to been picked up by the Master.

She had had a feeling that this would not be a normal game before they started. That story of their time back in the Academy, the “Gallifrey Rules”. She had had a feeling that those Rules were not merely as simple as all money to the centre.

Alison rolled, and moved the little car to Mayfair. She kept a determinedly straight face as she dealt out four hundred pounds, and put it back into the box beside her (the Doctor would not let the Master be the bank, and said that they couldn’t be bothered, so it had fallen to Alison), and shuffled through the pack of properties till she found the dark-blue topped card that had been so valued among her friends.

She looked up, still keeping her poker face, to see the Master with a little smile on his face, and the Doctor reflecting Alison’s insistent straight face.

“What’s the joke?” She felt kind of uncomfortable, like there was something she didn’t know. Though that wasn’t an uncommon feeling after all the time she had spent with those two.

The Master was smiling now.

“No, nothing, my dear... it’s just...” He glanced down at the Mayfair card. It was strange, there was something off about it. “Well, Ushas always got annoyed at Thet-” cough, “the Doctor’s excitement at getting Mayfair...”

* * *

That excitement was Theta’s. They had grown up.

Ushas had managed to infuse a poison into the card. None of them had been able to work out how she had done it. What had really confused them is that she had removed the card from time. Back then, he had thought that it had just become something for her to experiment on. It had had so much thrown at it, it relied on the science to stop its molecular bonding from falling apart.

It had used to turn the winner’s skin a pale green colour, and dye their hair a vivid red. There was nothing at all dangerous in there to a Gallifreyan biology. Hopefully it would be the same for a Human one.

Miss Cheney’s skin certainly did have a green tint to it, and the hair was... very red.

He leant over and picked up the card. He was pretty sure it would not affect him now. He had a feeling there was something off with the game.

“It’s the same card.” He said, pointlessly. The Doctor knew, and Miss Cheney had probably begun to put the pieces together.

“We were going to set up a forfeit system, but that was then rendered unnecessary.” He muttered. Miss Cheney looked somewhat confused.

“Couldn’t you just... not buy Mayfair?”

“Never.” A touch of the old impetuousness sparked in the Doctor’s eyes, the Master hid his smile.

Despite Miss Cheney getting Mayfair, she had a very similar playing strategy to the Doctor, though she may not have realised. The problem with that was, well, she had Mayfair, but not much else. She had spent most of her money on Mayfair, and nobody had yet landed on Free Parking.

It was taking up most of the board, and he could see Miss Cheney’s eyes drift to it occasionally. He had been a slight bit more organised with how he bought property, and he was not struggling with money, but he was pretty insistent that he would get Free Parking.

* * *

Alison was running very low, and had proceeded to land on Park Lane. She refused to accept a mortgage offer from the Master; she was pretty sure that deal was closer to a loan shark than what you normally found in Monopoly. She had kept all her property out of the game, as well as the money. The Master had said that the idea in games such as this was that the money ceased to exist. She felt that he was going to start explaining to her something that was closer to advanced economics than history, and she just nodded and allowed them to continue playing, but she watched.

Now that she was out, the Doctor seemed to be slightly more interest in the game than before. They had sat up in their chair, and were not sipping their wine so often. She would have been offended, but it seemed like something from the past. She had learnt in her time on the TARDIS that there was an awful lot of past between the two of them, and she may as well just shrug and get along with the present.

Anyway, they were enjoying themself a lot more now, and the Master seemed to be taking a bit more interest too. He was competitive anyway, but now there was a sense that this wasn’t just a competition, it was something that had been done many times before. A standoff that allowed them to forget themselves and everything between them.

Alison could be rather perceptive at times. And the Master wasn’t so good at hiding emotions as he liked to think.

While the Master did seem to have most of the money, Alison had not realised how well the Doctor was doing. They had landed on Free Parking, and did own about as much of the board as the Master did.

The Master was just building his fifth hotel, when he was sent to jail and the Gallifrey Rules began.

Now, Alison had seen strange house rules before but they weren’t usually so complex as this. Normally, they were just people ignoring some things, increasing others, and it would rarely get much further. But then the Doctor picked up their Get Out of Jail Free cards.

“How did this get to London in the twenty first century?” The Master asked. He took the card out of the Doctor’s hand, and examined it. “I recognise your writing.”

“Ask the Rani.” They sighed. “Well, let’s see... I’m pretty sure that hotel was bought with money you stole off Alison...” They started moving around the board, removing things which they apparently saw as wrong, and Alison picked up the card that the Master had discarded. She couldn’t understand what was written on it. It definitely wasn’t an Earth language.

“It says that I’ve been sent to jail, which means I’ve cheated, and they’re allowed to fix everything that I’ve done wrong.” He looked quite pleased.

“What if you haven’t cheated?”

“My dear Miss Cheney, I always cheat.” The Doctor placed a large stack of money in front of Alison, and placed her car at Go.

“... And... five counts of tax evasion...” The Doctor finally trailed off, and removed a good portion of the money that had been in front of the Master. The playing field suddenly looked far more even. Alison also began to realise why the Doctor had been quite so passive throughout most of the game. The Master was very good at cheating.

“And it seems you’re back in the game!” Alison was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked, but she wasn’t going to argue. Gallifreyan Rules made for a long game.

* * *

“Well, Miss Cheney, I feel we can come to an agreement.” The Master was shuffling through various notes, and speaking in that slow, slightly smug way that the Doctor had always warned her about. “How about... as the property is yours, you do not need to pay, but the Doctor...” He trailed off. It was as though he was thinking very carefully about his words, or trying to seem as though he was.

She shook her head, then nodded, and turned over the card. The Master gave a slight smile -another warning sign- and handed her three neat piles of notes.

* * *

They had been playing for three hours. That was not to say it was too long a game, but Miss Cheney and the Doctor were not looking too troubled. On the other hand, he owned most of the board, it was merely not that obvious. Never look at who’s name is on the property, look at who they are paying to keep it.

Miss Cheney probably knew, she was not unintelligent. And the Doctor certainly did. But they didn’t seem too shaken; he knew that this was petty, but the Doctor knew that this was in his nature. He was here to conquer, and if he had to do that through a simple Earth board game, so be it.

One of those plans that he believed the Doctor had never figured out (he certainly had never tried to stop it) took place during that time he had been stranded on Earth in the... seventies? Eighties... his memory banks did not seem clear...

But the Doctor had removed his ability to leave the planet, and he had had to keep himself occupied. Money was no object, and he had invested large amounts of money stocks. It had amused him, so he had continued. Then, suddenly, it had spiralled out of control...

Surely, if the Doctor had known, he would have reported him to the authorities...

They were now looking at him slightly strangely, and he realised that it was his turn. He coughed in a show of embarrassment and rolled the dice. Technically, Mayfair belonged to Alison, but that was of little importance. He wondered how long they could hold out. Not long. Their piles were starting to dwindle, and their still playing was due to some very lucky landings on Free Parking. The Master’s habit of paying for everything in five hundred pound notes meant that it was a very lucrative.

They had to resign soon. Of course, he would win whatever happened.

“I think I will unmortgage Mayfair...” Alison said, and pulled out the necessary notes. Exact change.

“And I Park Lane.” The Doctor was humming a song that belonged on a stage putting on a bad performance of Gilbert and Sullivan. What made it worse was that they continued. Yes, their money was dwindling further, and his was growing, but he was actually having to pay. It was unacceptable.

* * *

Alison made eye contact with the Doctor. While their face remained perfectly straight, she could tell that they were smiling. They were probably planning some snarky wise-crack for when one of them won against the Master. They had somehow managed to avoid jail throughout the game, and retained both of their Get Out of Jail Free cards. The whole game felt odd to Alison, but the Doctor had encouraged her continue, to unmortgage everything, play like the Master didn’t have a very obvious advantage, so she did. She didn’t know the Master well enough to tell if he was disgruntled. She wasn’t sure if he showed any emotions that he didn’t let get past him. It was the robotics, he was very hard to read.

* * *

The Doctor made eye contact with the Master, but felt it would be immature to stick out their tongue. It was one of those perfect games, and they could see the Master’s displeasure at how well it was following the typical path.

You did have to allow him to get into the stream of things, he had to feel like he was winning. It was like fencing, the Doctor would give the Master just enough to make him feel like he had a chance, then they would move forward and stick the sword into his chest, as though it could possibly hurt. Some quip about exercise making them hungry, bite to eat, then continue. Fighting was a game, and they had to make sure it played along the right track.

They abhorred violence. This was how they fought, since they hadn’t needed to fight him in so long.

He sometimes joked about being ‘tamed’, when he was especially sick of the roundels, but the Doctor could still remember the yellow of those eyes and the sharpness of those incisors. They had specifically designed the Master’s dentistry to contain very blunt incisors.

They could not manipulate a Monopoly game to their own ends. Not really. They couldn’t set it out beforehand. But they had played a lot of games of Monopoly, and many of them were against the Master, and they knew how he played. They knew what properties to buy, what to mortgage to him, what to buy back. He was truly so unimaginative when it came to board games. He still played by the same strategy he had devised over their first game when they were little more than time tots.

“It’s almost like you want to lose.” They said, absentmindedly, not really aware they were speaking allowed. The Master did not flinch, did not respond, said nothing. “Though I did always win, back when it mattered.”

The game was coming to a close. Both Alison and the Doctor had both unmortgaged most of their property. Now they must merely diminish the Master’s money.

“Doctor, how much do you want for Park Lane?” It was Alison. They gave some paltry sum, merely for show, and handed it over. The dark blues had hotels, and landing on that would bankrupt you very fast.

* * *

“You see, my dear, good always wins out in the end.” Their emphasis on ‘my dear’ was enough that a lesser man would have hit them. Programming allowing. Miss Cheney may have registered his eagerness to win, but what she probably had not realised was what a bad winner the Doctor was. They tended to react a similar way to winning as many would to loosing. The Master had learnt to take failure in his stride, but that doesn’t mean he had to like it.

As he and Miss Cheney packed up the board, and the Master considered how long he would allow the Doctor to keep it before it met with another unhappy accident, the Doctor strolled over to the fire, which was burning low, and picked up the copy of Frankenstein. They examined it for a second, then placed it back on the table. There was something strange about the movements.

“We need to get this to Gallifrey.” Ah.

“Gallifrey’s gone. Or in the TARDIS. You cannot meddle with time.”

“You always did.”

“Not like that.” He sighed. “It will get to Gallifrey, to the Academy. It doesn’t seem to have too much choice in the matter.” Miss Cheney’s skin and hair was only just starting to change back to normal.

“So?”

“We must merely set it on its way. It should find its own way to where it should be.” He cast his mind back to when it had first appeared. Borusa had been giving Theta a lecture on... something that he had done, and he had been standing outside in the corridor, staring at the ceiling. There had been a... sound almost like a TARDIS. The Doctor’s wheezing, groaning, Type 40 TARDIS.

* * *

The two of them attempted to get to the coordinates closest to that point in time and space, while breaking as few of the Laws of Time as possible (the Doctor had never liked breaking some of those), and without hitting the Brick Wall of Rassilon that was probably somewhere around. Alison was standing by the doors, and at the right moment (when the Master said ‘Now!’) the Doctor had pulled the door lever and Alison had chucked the box out, as hard as she could. They hadn’t materialised, but their point in the vortex was about as close to the point they couldn’t materialise in as possible, so there was some small amount of chance.

Hopefully.

****  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The Doctor can be horrible.


End file.
